This blog describes Metatime in the Posthuman experience, drawn from Sir Isaac Newton's secret work on the future end of times, a tract in which he described Histories of Things to Come. His hidden papers on the occult were auctioned to two private buyers in 1936 at Sotheby's, but were not available for public research until the 1990s.

It looks like an architectural fantasy from a world far in the future, but Michael Hansmeyer's complex column design is so real you can touch it.

His work is composed of sixteen million faces and made from 2,700 layers of cardboard. It is the result of a cutting-edge computational process and people's responses to it are just as improbable.

"Some people say it looks like a reptile, some people think it looks like an underwater creature and other people bring up the Gothic," said Hansmeyer, an architect and computer scientist based at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

The incredible complexity of the column's fractal surface is the product of what is known as a "subdivision algorithm," a process that used a computer program to divide and sub-divide the the facets of a classical Doric column.

This is a true example of retro-futurism, where something ancient is recast into a sci-fi fantasy using current tech. To see Hansmeyer's work go to his Website here. All images are copyrighted by him and reproduced strictly for purposes of review.

NOTES FOR READERS OF MY POSTS.If you're not reading this post on Histories of Things to Come, the content has been stolen and republished without the original author's permission. Please let me know by following this link and leaving me a comment. Thank you.

3 comments:

People may have varied ways of describing this, but I can think of only one that properly fits, stunningly gorgeous. Like Mandelbrot's first display of fractals, this invokes the beauty hidden within a mathematical formula.

About Me

Welcome to my blog, dedicated to the aporia, anomie, mysteries, and nervous tensions of the turn of the Millennium. I'm a writer and academic, trained in the field of history. These are my histories of things that define the spirit of our times. This blog also goes beyond historians' visions of the past, and examines how metatime and time are perceived in other media and disciplines, between generations, and in high and pop culture.